300th birthday of Gerhard Tersteegen - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1997 - 110 Pfennig

On November 25, 1697 Gerhard Tersteegen was born in the then Dutch-Orian Moers. After the Latin school, he first entered the profession of father and became a merchant. Prompted by his Pietistic piety, the twenty-year-old Tersteegen exchanged the troubled merchant profession with the quieter of a bandwright to live in seclusion. His pastoral discussions and visits made him the classic pastor of Pietism, a movement in the 17th / 18th. Century, which set the goal of a new Reformation by reviving the frozen church. He turned against a mindlessly accepted "Erbreligion" and wrote a large number of small writings, including his "Spiritual Flower Garden of Hearts," a collection of his own spiritual songs. Since 1727 he held large revival meetings and domestic construction hours, in which he reached countless listeners. He never spied sharp polemics on him, but in a very concrete and friendly manner he addressed his contemporaries. He also took care of the sick, for whom he made simple medicines. When, in 1756, a fracture made it impossible for him to speak in larger meetings and to travel, his work again focused on conversations in his own home and on a worldwide correspondence. On April 3, 1769 Gerhard Tersteegen died in Mühlheim an der Ruhr. In addition to the songs of Tersteegen in all Protestant hymnbooks, which are still especially popular today, one of the best known of him is "I pray to the power of love revealed in Jesus". (Text: Wilhelm Schlemmer, Evangelical Church in Germany, Bonn)